In the past six months, the amount of bandwidth used by streaming video software has quadrupled, according to Chris King, the company’s director of product marketing. And P2P filesharing traffic is up seven-fold, he says. It’s not that more companies are allowing P2P or video streaming. It’s just that the people doing it are using a lot more bandwidth. “It’s a massive increase within the companies that are using them,” he says. “There’s just more comfort with getting busted using streaming at work.”

Another factor: More people are sharing and watching high-definition video. A typical compressed DVD image is about one or two gigabytes. But convert that film to Blu-ray and it’s close to three times that size.

Palo Alto Networks does these surveys every six months, and in the latest results, they picked up one other interesting trend. Facebook may be the 2,000 pound gorilla in the social networking space, but Tumblr and Pinterest are quickly making up ground. Looking at only the bandwidth used by social networking applications, Facebook makes up 54 percent of that traffic — up from 37 percent late last year. Tumblr went from 1 percent of traffic to 10 percent in the past six months.

Palo Alto Networks only started looking for Pinterest traffic in May, but it’s already at 1 percent, King says. “Even though we only had the app identified for one month of that six-month period, it still made a huge dent.”

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